Articles from When Saturday Comes. All 27 years of WSC are in the process of being added. This may take a while.
National tensions are expressing themselves through Belgium's two biggest clubs. John Chapman looks at the latest instalment
Anderlecht’s Marcin Wasilewski has twice made the front cover of Belgium’s leading football magazine in recent weeks: once when he was using his elbows to great effect against Standard Liège and then being stretchered off against the same club.
Having acquired sporting representatives in Austria and the US, Red Bull have turned to Germany. Paul Joyce assesses the fallout
No city exemplifies the decline of East German football since reunification more starkly than Leipzig. Lokomotive Leipzig, European Cup-Winners Cup finalists in 1987, went bankrupt in 2004 and had to restart at the bottom of the league pyramid. They now play in the same fifth division as former GDR champions Sachsen Leipzig, who entered insolvency in March with debts of €3 million (£2.7m).
Paul Joyce looks back at Lucerne's Nationalliga A triumph, their sole league title to date
The long-term significance
In 1987, the Nationalliga A was reduced from 16 to 12 clubs and the season was split into two parts. After a pre-Christmas “qualifying round”, points were halved and carried forward into a “final round” contested by the top eight clubs. As their budgets increased, Swiss clubs were able to attract young overseas talent and also ageing stars, such as Marco Tardelli, who looked forward to playing the “stress-free football” that Karl-Heinz Rummenigge was enjoying at Servette. By 1989, 46 per cent of players in the NLA were foreigners. These changes made the league harder to predict. Neuchâtel Xamax won their only two championships in 1987 and 1988, and FC Lucerne’s sole league title followed in 1989.
Hooliganism is not attractive, but the media are more than willing to exploit its financial potential
We received a call at the WSC office from a researcher at the BBC. He was canvassing views about football violence for a forthcoming programme. He had an angle, prompted by recent events: “It’s never really gone away, has it? Should we not be concerned about what might happen at the World Cup?” This was in 1990.
The papers were pleased by the trouble at West Ham v Millwall – it gave them a reason to get angry
“We hoped it had disappeared forever but deep down we knew it was still out there festering, simmering.” Unfortunately Ken Dyer of London’s Evening Standard was not speaking about the hypocritical moralising of the great British newspapers, but rather the shocking, photogenic and highly lucrative stories about football hooliganism in the wake of the violence at West Ham v Millwall. “Today, when the blood is washed from the pavements of east London and the ripped seats, coins and debris are cleared from the pitch, questions will be asked,” mused Dyer evocatively. Perhaps, prior to writing about the “violence we prayed had left our game for good”, he ought to have questioned his paper’s marketing team’s use of billboards plastered with the gaudy advertisement: Football riots – all the pictures inside.